


Lies and Comfort

by downlookingup



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Minor Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-15 03:47:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8041321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downlookingup/pseuds/downlookingup
Summary: After Pennytree.





	Lies and Comfort

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ladyoftarth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyoftarth/gifts).



> Written for the GOT Fic Exchange. The prompt was: "Jaime helps Brienne bury Hyle Hunt. Then they have to find Podrick."
> 
> I've never written a complete canon fic before, and I enjoyed trying to come up with a BwoB outcome that hasn't been done before.
> 
> Thanks to ikkiM for the beta and the support.

She leads him away from the camp and into the forest, and they ride for a few hours in disconcerting silence. The half-moon makes her armor glow like a blue flame. Jaime can read the lies in the slump of her shoulders. She won't look at him, not even when she announces that they must stop in a clearing until dawn. Jaime is unsettled, but not afraid, and he supposes that makes him a fool. They only knew each other for six moons, and half of those with him as her prisoner. What does he know of Brienne of Tarth? _Everything,_ a voice says. _Or close enough that it makes no difference._

Neither of them sleeps. They sit facing each other, stiff in their armor, their backs against a pair of old oaks, and they wait. Apart from the bandage on her face, he has noticed the stiffness in her left arm and the shallowness of her breathing. _A broken arm, perhaps some ribs as well._ And she looks tired and too thin. The last time they were in each other’s presence, she was shy and awkward, determined and hopeful. She took his sword and gave him a promise in return, to find and protect Sansa Stark. For his sake, she said.

That stubborn wench with the shining blue eyes has been replaced by a broken woman with sallow skin and hollowed cheeks. _What happened to you, Brienne?_ If he asks, he knows she won't answer.

* * *

He can tell she's surprised in the morning when they're still alone. Her eyes keep darting to the tree line as she tears into the strip of dried horse meat that he’s given her. Whoever was meant to meet them has failed to arrive. Until now, he’d been harboring a sliver of hope that she _was_ telling the truth about Clegane and the Stark girl, but her worried silence speaks volumes.

When she catches him watching her, she pales. She pauses by her horse for a long time, staring at the reins in her gloved hand. He wishes she'd just come out with it. Instead, she says, “We'll keep moving now.”

Jaime sighs. “As you wish, my lady.”

* * *

The trees are full of corpses, bloated, black and blue and purple and red, like rotten plums swinging in the biting winter breeze. The smell turns Jaime’s stomach. The Maid of Tarth rides on, hardly sparing a glance at the pitiful bodies. Her back is straight, her left hand holds the reins loosely, her right is on Oathkeeper’s pommel. Jaime feels a spark of lightning shooting up his spine, imagines she feels the same. _This is a dangerous place_.

“Brienne, we shouldn't be here.” He speaks softly, but his voice travels quickly in the quiet, open space and is returned by the forest in a distorted echo. _Be here, here, here..._

She shakes her head. “We must keep going, Ser.” Her words fall flat, die away the moment they bounce off her crooked teeth and slip through her thick lips.

* * *

Whatever this place was, it is no longer. The mouth of a cave gapes hungrily, dark smoke streaming from within, and there are more bodies on the ground, but these people have died by the sword, not the rope. With a distressed shout, Brienne dismounts before the horse comes to a stop and falls to her knees next to a body. Jaime watches in silence as she takes the man’s hand and presses her forehead against it, her large, blue eyes glistening with tears.

The man was in bad shape before he died, that much is clear. One of his eyes is swollen shut, the other is purple and red. There's a rope burn around his neck, but the wound that killed him runs across his belly, from which his guts have spilled out grotesquely. He hasn't been dead long.

“Who is he?”

“A knight,” she says. “A good man. I killed him.”

He's never seen her cry before, he realizes with a pang suddenly. Not when they were taken by the Bloody Mummers, or when Lady Stark died. He thinks he should say something, comfort her somehow, but stops himself. He is beginning to understand the purpose of her deception. His hand finds the hilt of his sword and holds there.

“Where is Sansa Stark?” he asks. “Where is the Hound?”

Tears are streaming down her face, leaving pale streaks on her grimy cheeks. “I'm sorry,” she says, before she stumbles to her feet, draws Oathkeeper, and runs into the cavern.

* * *

Jaime thanks whatever gods will listen that he didn't lose his ears as well as his sword hand. The wench sounds as though she’s miles away, shouting a name he doesn't recognize. He follows her voice into the darkness, the path winding dizzyingly the further he goes into the cave.

And finally, they stop.

If this cave were a castle, this would be the great hall. A high ceiling, a large fire pit in the center of the room, tables and chairs and straw mattresses and cots, made here or stolen. The shadows are harsh here, even as the fire is bright. As Jaime enters the chamber and nears the pit, he sees more clearly.

A thin man in and tattered robes sits on the ground next to the corpse of a woman. He gives Brienne a slow, gap-toothed smile from beneath his tangled grey beard. “You're too late, my lady.”

Her voice trembles as she whispers, “What have you done?”

“I saw it in the flames,” he says, and suddenly, Jaime recognizes him, the faint accent lining his speech. Jaime remembers Thoros of Myr, his flaming sword swinging high above everyone’s head when they disembarked on the shores of Pyke so many years ago. Thoros looks as though he lost half of himself somehow, in more ways than one. “I did what I had to do.”

Jaime steps forward. “What happened here?”

Thoros does not look surprised to see him. “Wolves, Kingslayer. A pack of them came in the night. The men left to chase them off. They've not come back.” He turns to Brienne. “She stayed behind to await your return. When the flames spoke to me, I killed her and her guards.”

“And Podrick?”

“He escaped in the chaos. I pray to R'hllor he got away from the wolves.”

Jaime edges the fire pit until he's close enough to the body to see the face, and nausea almost overpowers him. The white hair, the bloody gauges on the cheeks. The discolored tongue, hanging grotesquely from the distended jaw. None of it is enough to hide what he doesn't want to see. Lady Catelyn is dead for a second time.

* * *

Brienne wants to give her knight and her lady proper burials, but there are no shovels in the Brotherhood’s hideout. Instead, they burn them in a pyre outside the cavern. Gently, she lays the bodies down on the logs before setting them aflame and kneels in front of the fire to choke out a prayer, the air thick with the stink of charred flesh.

Then, still on her knees, her eyes wide and guileless, she speaks. In fits and starts of crying, she tells him what happened. “I wasn’t going to do it, Ser Jaime, I swear,” she sobs, looking up at him plaintively.

Jaime doesn’t speak, only stares into the fire, stewing in his fury. He should shout insults at her, spit in her face, slice her throat open with his sword. The stupid wench hadn’t even had a plan to save him and her companions. She’d meant to demand a trial by combat and be their champion or offer her life in exchange for theirs or something equally idiotic. And all for whom? A boy, a penniless hedge knight, and an oathbreaker.

 _She would have died for me_ , he thinks, and all the anger leaves him like smoke fading in the wind.

* * *

It’s past midnight when they reach the clearing they’d slept in the night before. They tie the horses to an elm, eat the meager portions of hard bread and moldy cheese Thoros had given them before they left, and build a small fire, just large enough to warm their hands for a while. The wind is colder now and dark clouds are rolling in from the north. Jaime fears they will not survive if a blizzard catches them out here without a tent or heavy furs. They might need to huddle together and share their bodies’ warmth.

Brienne sits across from him, staring into the fire. The flames cast eerie shadows on her face, changing her countenance with every flicker; now, she looks like the hardened Crone, now the restless Warrior, now the vulnerable Maiden. The urge to comfort her returns, stronger than before, and this time, he doesn't resist it.

He moves to sit on her right, their armored shoulders pressed together, and takes her hand. He squeezes it softly, and hopes the gesture conveys everything he wants to say; that he's sorry for everything that's happened to her, that he wishes he hadn't sent her on this fool’s quest by herself, that he would give anything to go back to that afternoon in King’s Landing and follow her out the city.

When he was a squire, he wanted to be like a knight in the songs, and with her, he could have been. Two hedge knights traveling through the kingdom in search of a lost princess, fighting outlaws, eating what they could find, sleeping under the stars. _Perhaps fucking under the stars_. The thought comes to him as sudden as a fit of madness, and he feels his cock stir in his breeches. Would the Maid of Tarth push him away or would she bend under the weight of his kisses?

She’s staring at their clasped hands, her buck teeth worrying her lower lip.

“What will you do come morning?” Jaime asks.

“I don't know. I have to find Pod.”

Podrick, her squire. Tyrion’s squire. He wants to meet the boy, if only to see what kind of boy would end up in the service of two people as different and as remarkable as Tyrion and Brienne. _And to ask if his former master is truly a kingslayer_.

“We’ll follow the roads, check the nearby villages,” he says. “He’s almost certainly looking for you, though that might make our task more difficult.”

“ _Our_ task?” Her mouth is agape. “Don't you have to return? Your men—”

“If you think I'm letting you ride off to your death again— _alone_ —, you're sorely mistaken.”

Her eyes well with tears. They shimmer in the firelight like gemstones. “But, Jaime— _Ser_ , I _betrayed_ you.”

She says it with such heart-rending emotion, he can't help but laugh. “You stupid, honorable wench. I understand why you did it, just as you understood why I killed Aerys.”

“You're not Aerys, Jaime.”

He smirks. “No, I’m sure I'm far more handsome.”

Brienne shakes her head. _There's the stubborn wench I know_. “Jaime...”

“There's no use in arguing. We’ll find your little squire, and then we’ll work on fulfilling that vow we made.”

She gasps. “You mean…”

 _Sansa_. They don’t need to say it. The way a smile blooms on her too-thin face makes his heart beat a little faster. His cheeks stretch almost painfully when he returns it. “Now help me take off my armor. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

With stiff fingers, she helps divest him of his golden armor. He does the same with her own blue armor, though his lack of a hand requires that she do much more. They lay down on the grass. Most of the stars were hidden behind the clouds, but there he glimpses the Moonmaid high in the sky. It reminds him of another night they spent under the stars while he was delirious with pain. _Live, and fight, and take revenge_ , she whispered in the dark.

He finds her hand again, and this time, she presses it back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is also up on the [got_exchange livejournal page](http://got-exchange.livejournal.com/185409.html). Please drop by and check out the amazing works posted there.


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